I’m not going to lie to you, a combination of the three day weekend and the insane heatwave that we’ve experienced continuing from that weekend has made me feel quite lazy, to the point of not wanting to do ANYTHING much less write up music, but for you, I shall soldier on.

The Centerhits – City Girlfriend EP. The Centerhits are a three-piece punk rock band out of Fukuoka Japan with three releases under their belt. The do a fast slightly pop slightly cute songs made for pogo-ing with surreal and at times ironic lyrics. The City Girlfriend EP and Your Pest Band split (both on Snuffy Smiles) thankfully come with lyrics, because otherwise I wouldn’t understand exactly what is going on here. Which is kind of funny as at least one of the songs is about someone who can’t speak English that well. Highly recommended for dancing around in your underwear singing into a hairbrush as a microphone. Their Myspace page has a few sample songs so you can get a taste.

Defektors – Secret Trails / Doomsday Girl single- This is two years old, but I just got this now. Defektors This is swing garage punk but without the pretense of excessive gunk. Both songs are great hip shakers with a great pop sensibility. Doomsday Girl is the clear stand out of the two with an immediate hook that’s been baited with a fuzz that had me flopping around like a caught fish (to finish out a horrible and ill advised metaphor). They’ve got another single and a newer full album out, and I need to get my hands on that immediately. “Doomsday Girl” is featured on the band’s MySpace page.

Black Congress – Davidians / London’s Burning- This band has been described as “Houston’s greatest live band” and “Jesus Lizard wannabes.” Unfortunately I can only speak to one of these, while there’s a strong aggressive noise rock strain that shoots through both tracks, I can see why people make the comparison to Jesus Lizard, at least with Davidians, but London’s Burning ups the speed generating an explosive DESPERATE sound on behalf of the band, giving it a noisier, more modern sound, but there’s nothing “fun” about this. This is music to accentuate your bad days. You can hear four songs directly from their bandcamp page.

Tayisha Busay - Shock-Woo! EP- My new found love for this band is quite evident with my previous writing on their live show, but the problem is that a great live show does not always translate to sounding good when you try to nail down the music to any kind of permanence. This EP is 5 songs, 3 original mixes and two remixes. It opens with “WTF You Doin’ In My Mouth” which is funny, but thankfully short as anything longer than its minute and a half may make it outlive its novelty. “Tonight” the second and strongest song on the EP is about the long, long weekends of having too much fun, something I think everyone can relate to, where the only respite from life is going out. “Soul Power” is a very clever response track to Of Montreal’s “Bunny Ain’t No Kind of Rider.” The final two tracks are remixes which are both good but I think that I’d have preferred to have the original versions on this release, or included along with the remixes. You can grab this for $5 when you see them live (which you should) or you can dl it from Itunes.

EULA – 2010 Demo – EULA is amazing and this three-song demo shows that their new releases cannot come soon enough. “Maurice Narcisse” is a ripper as the rhythm section takes full control with simple walks up and down a minefield. “Dirty Hands” takes the band to more familiar territory, and I think it’s just the mix but this song sounds close to strange 1990’s alternative music with sing-spoken vocalizations that builds to shouted chorus, it sounds like it’s been through a few permutations since I first heard the song live a year ago. “Texas Stampede” is in the same vein as “Rosie” off of The Language of Threat, their 2009 release, but Alyse shows a wide range of vocal styles, alternating between a processed swirling tornado of sound and a more intimate, nearly folk affectation. Some enterprising label should pick them up, just so we can continue to get new music from this band as regular intervals, as each release shows EULA has a font of creativity that cannot be stopped.

Category : album Review

0 Comment »

Sunpower sounds like someone loved the Dead Kennedys and tried to go out of their way to imitate them but have since pulled back away from that track and while the guitar tone and vocal style are still there, there’s enough of a distinction that allows you to enjoy Sunpower on their own merits.

Bondage is their fourth LP release and their third studio album, following 2009’s Live split, 2008’s Pain for Profit and 2007’s Say Something. Coming five years into their career as a band, Say Something was full of sharp bursts of snotty songs full of sarcasm and ‘abilly twang. It was fun, and political with lots of callbacks to previous musicians but never in a way that was self-consciously reflexive. Say Something was a fun fast little ditty of an album.
(more…)

Category : album Review

0 Comment »

So after the Italian showcase, I made it straight away to catch yet another matinee daylight dance party.

Gordon Voidwell was performing and I was curious to see how things were looking for the former four piece turned three piece when Jamie Lidell snatched Guillermo E. Brown to be a part of his band. With Guillermo’s Zenphone gone, the Voidwell crew had become completely hardware based. No laptops on stage at all. So I wanted to catch how the new arrangements sounded.

Guess who wasn’t a three piece. Joining them onstage was Guillermo playing auxiliary percussion and a drummer whose name I didn’t catch playing a digital drum kit right next to Kassa. But they still played the new arrangements but there was a constant wall of percussion. Gordon and crew were definitely the best dressed of Northside Festival with red and white two-toned outfits, but they were also one of the most energetic.

Opening with “Heart of Glass” they filled nearly every second of stage time with great music, “Ivy League Circus”, “White Friends” and “Shadow” all made appearances with a new, fuller bass sound as Tecla handles everything that isn’t percussion or lead vocals. I felt sorry for every band that had to follow, but I couldn’t stick around because my phone was dying and I needed food.

Tayisha Busay Party at House of Yes.

We loved Tayisha Busay so much at Crushfest that we had to go see them again and we had to watch the showcase they put together at House of Yes. If there were more acts that aligned with what Tayisha Busay were doing, I HAD to know about them and though my crush was two days old, I got everything I wanted and free alcohol.

House of Yes was a sweatbox with a ton of artfully dressed kids and glitter everywhere. Free alcohol and fun dance music made my series of updates from the venue make less and less sense and typos abound.

We walked in and DJ Tantric was giving us lazer bass, booty bounce, grind and speed garage. It was party music and it was a great way to set the mood. Probably the only party whose DJs had us moving.

Chappo was the first band and they reminded me of early Of Montreal, psychedelic garage noise with costumes, costumes, costumes. There was a weird bit where they went on an extended, uh, Native American theme that was uncomfortable. White dudes in mock headdresses are not really cool. The music was very good though.

Planet Rump played a very interesting part of the whole line up. In between sets they’d come out and play a song or two and get off the stage. Planet Rump is DJ Tantric, Miss Strawberry and Nasty Ness who make some straight up 86 style party jams. Sound of the City meets sound of the bedroom. A hell of a lot of fun.

Tayisha Busay was a great time again. They changed up the dance routines from just two days ago, which shows me that they’re not content to just run through the same movements from show to show. They are a LOT of fun and songs like “Tonight” show that there is more to them than simulated sex acts and rolling around puking glitter. Which reminds me, they puked glitter. It was pretty amazing. If you like Ninjasonik and other party jams bands in that mold, there’s no reason to not check out Tayisha Busay.

After that we had planned on hitting up Public Assembly to catch FaltyDL, but like every other showcase, the Tayisha show was like an hour late, so we missed them. When we made it to Public Assembly, we were told that the FaltyDL party wasn’t part of Northside and charged, which is contradicted repeatedly on L Magazine’s website and program guide, so whatever.

Category : Show Review

0 Comment »

So Friday was a slight let down, but we were determined to not let that stand in the way of a good time as we ended up hitting no less than 5 shows and seeing around a dozen bands playing everything from industrial pop to….whatever the hell The Señors of Marseille consider themselves to do.

Let’s break it down from the top.
(more…)

Category : Show Review

0 Comment »

From a logistical standpoint, last night was a bit of a bust. We had planned on hitting Shea Stadium to see Shilpa Ray perform a solo set then head out and catch MEN at The Knitting Factory but it didn’t go according to plan.
(more…)

Category : Show Review

0 Comment »

Day one of The L Magazine’s Northside Festival is done and it was already a bit of a doozy. From last night’s many offerings, from Wavves and DOM at the Knitting Factory to ?uestlove DJing at Brooklyn Bowl to My Teenage Stride at The Charleston, we choose to cover MeanRed’s Crush Fest, a multi-genre, multi-room celebration of music MeanRed loves to dance to.

Taking over both of Public Assembly’s rooms, Crush Fest seemed like the perfect distillation of what Northside Festival strives to be. A collection of bands, both local and touring, that encapsulates interesting music. While MeanRed is known for their dance parties, this gave them a chance to stretch their muscles and display a side that many people may not know.
(more…)

Category : Show Review

0 Comment »

Extra Life is the current project of Charlie Looker, multi-instrumentalist composer who was in the “brutalist chamber group” Zs and worked with Brooklyn heroes The Dirty Projectors. Using what was described as a combination of “Medieval change, hardcore, dark neofolk abstract modernism and lush pop” there is a degree of intimidation up front, as though a modern listener going into this for the first time may be intimidated, as though the disparate intellectualist genre touch points will scare off those who aren’t open minded enough to at least give it a shot.

In the actual act of listening to Splayed Flesh (Socket Records) it’s like listening to Tilt-era Scott Walker meets early death rock and in the act of listening, the listener not cowed into submission. Even those with just a passing familiarity of medieval music that extends to that weird era in the late 90s when there are a million chanting monk CDs in stores and listening to movie scores to get a grasp of “modern orchestral” music will find pieces of familiarity which will allow them to grab hold and begin to examine the music as it stands on its own, divorced of context.
(more…)

Category : album Review

0 Comment »

Rebels Eat Apples’ Body Popular is a great release. In the past week I’ve had it, I’ve listened to some tracks nearly twenty times, forsaking other assignments just to squeeze out that rush of serotonin that hits when the weird keyboard solo kicks in on “Tropical Pepperoni” and trying to discern the lyrics to the blown out portions of “The Many Moys.” Body Popular makes me want to do things like rip the headphones from people’s head and force them to listen until they are dancing drunk on the pop explosions in their ear drums.

Attempts to find more about this band led me to the Ourselves Collective, one of a handful of donation based record labels releasing quality digital files for their acts asking that you pay what you will. Emailing the label for contact info I was able to get in contact with Matt Saporito, the man behind Rebels Eat Apples, to pose some questions for him.
(more…)

Category : interview

0 Comment »

We Never Learn is the story of what happened to fun time rock n’ roll in the 1980s, when punk went hard and arty but some bands just wanted to raise a little hell and play sloppy and fast. It’s written by Eric Davidson, of New Bomb Turks fame, and takes the form of interviews, oral history, personal recollections with a smattering of ‘zine covers, show flyers, photographs and perhaps most impressively, a soundtrack.

What Eric Davidson is doing is trying to give a succinct history of the modern garage rock and garage punk movements, collecting them under the genre heading of “Gunk Punk” which is as good a term as any for the messy, sloppy (sometimes intentional, sometimes not) fun time, fuck you school of post-serious punk that rose up in the wake of hardcore.

What a lot of the bands have in common is a love of unearthed 50s and 60s trash culture, whether it was the music unearthed in the quintessential nostalgia compilation Nuggets or in the later Back From the Grave series, car culture, bad sci-fi and horror movies and a burning desire to make some music that tears up the sidewalk as it roars past.

A lot of the book is weighted towards stuff like Crypt Records and Cleveland orbits grabbing interviews and reminisces from both, while passing on some things which I would have though interesting to have addressed, such as other acts in different genres pulling from the same backgrounds and musical influences to make different, but similar music (for example, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult’s Hit and Run Holiday or even psychobilly).

Eric’s use of language is strained at times, but how many times can you type “lo-fi” without going mad, so it’s here where it really became problematic for me. Gunk-Fi, Nix-Fi, Nil-Fi, and on and on. Aside from this grating example his vocabulary and ear for phrasing worked quite well, finding almost as many ways to describe the bands as there were bands to describe.

A lot of the stories seem to follow the same rhythms. New band, hella touring, little album sales, lots of drinking, lots of drugging, total breakdown in relationships of the band, break up. Wash, Rinse, Repeat across a few hundred pages. It’s like the “hundred words for snow.”

Stand out interviews are Blag Dahlia of the Dwarves, all the various Mick Collins stories, Teengenerates, Jon Spencer across his various bands and the history of The Gibson Brothers. A lot of the band histories make it seem like something was in the water, as bands would form the next town over without any knowledge of the others in a scene, but the interconnected nature of “the scene” is also explored; how bands, and zines influenced bands and zines.

What was really helpful was the included soundtrack. The book comes with a download coupon for 20 MP3 files ranging from live show recordings to studio recordings and everything in between. It’s quite impressive as it aims to help people who’ve never heard of these bands get a handle on what the music was like at its most desperate hungry and dangerous.

Category : Book Review

0 Comment »

Rebels Eat Apples album Body Popular is a bit of a hidden gem. A multi-faceted pop soaked lowest fidelity high tone hilarious bobby sock crotch rot great time. Filled with simple songs that flow in that stupid smart way that the best garage punk revivalists straddle.
(more…)

Category : album Review

0 Comment »